thetrainline – great Travel app for checking Train times & Booking tickets in the United Kingdom

thetrainline.com is a premier train times and ticket booking app for trains in the United Kingdom. If you’re a UK native like me and use public transport from time to time, or perhaps plan on visiting the British Isles and hope to by travelling by rail, this is a great app for planning your journey and buying tickets.

Pros & Cons:

Pros

Easy to search for train times!

Simple to book and buy tickets!

Good user interface!

Cons

Free app but takes booking fee.

Lacks a simple means to display journey.

Features:

thetrainline.com is a popular UK website for checking out train times and booking tickets. The app is a great way to facilitate travel around the UK using these services while on the go. The user interface is really slick and it’s easy to quickly identify the trains you need to take.

The main menu provides four initial options: find trains, my tickets, my account and app info. ‘Find trains’ lets you select your origin and destination and easily add whether you want to book a single or return ticket in addition to including who will be making the journey; adults, children, multiples of each. Finally you can include whether you have a specific rail card for savings. For example, I have a ‘Family and Friends Railcard’ which means when I travel with one or more of my children I can get a really good discount. What I really like about this section of the app is that it saves your previously searched journeys, making it easy if you make a similar trip on a regular basis. Once you’ve decided on your journey and confirmed which tickets you want to buy you can enter your credit card details securely and buy the tickets. The only thing left is to pick them up!

‘My tickets’ will obviously list your purchased tickets. If you’re planning a series of different connections, this is ideal for managing your tickets. ‘My account’ gives you access to your thetrainline.com account, if you have one, and info between the app and site syncs. Finally ‘App info’ has a stack of information including T&C’s, data costs, mTickets and how to pickup the tickets once you have bought them.

For quick and easy booking of tickets, it’s a no-brainer. Unfortunately using the app incurs a booking fee and, while this isn’t very much, is obviously going to make your transactions a tiny bit more expensive. The app is quite focused on letting you buy tickets and while there is a means to save a journey, there’s no good way to follow which connections you need to make. Websites like nationalrail.co.uk offer a Journey Planner service which lets you text the details to your phone, so it’s a shame you can’t do this as easily on thetrainline app.

These issues aside, it remains a great app for checking train times and an intuitive way to beat lengthy queues at the train station when buying your tickets in advance. Whether you buy tickets or not, it’s probably the most polished and user friendly app for checking times and routes. Additionally, they make pretty quirky adverts…

Usefulness:

Incredibly useful for folks in the UK, it might even be the difference between being stuck in the middle of nowhere without a ticket and being in the right place on time! Don’t leave anything to chance, be prepared!

Ease of Use:

The app is blissfully easy to use. The UI is incredibly intuitive and finding trains, prices and stations is very simple.

Frequently Used:

I travel by train quite a lot so this is great for me personally. It would also be good for people planning a big trip, regular commuters or people visiting the UK on holiday.

Interface:

The interface makes the app what it is. Because it’s very smooth, easy to use and straight forward, it’s actually quite fun to check out times/schedules, etc.

AndroidTapp.com Rating

(4.2 out of 5)

Should you Download thetrainline? I really like the look of this app and I think anyone either travelling in the UK by train currently or perhaps planning to in the future to download. It’s easy to use and intuitive. I wish there was a more simplistic journey planner, which would make the app not just about buying tickets but helping you make your connections in a timely manner. The app is free, which is great considering a few other rail apps charge. Definitely give it a look, it’s the ideal app to have for travelling in the United Kingdom.